


The Taste of Rust

by RuinsPlume



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aftercare, Angst, BDSM, Background Remus/Sirius, Bad BDSM negotiations, Book 3: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Intergluteal Sex, M/M, Riding Crops, conversations about Lily, mention of past bullying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 19:16:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8172868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RuinsPlume/pseuds/RuinsPlume
Summary: Snape’s eyebrows flicker up, though his face remains impassive.“So,” he says. “You do trust me a little, then.”“No,” Remus replies. “I owe you.”“Yes, Lupin.” Snape steps closer. “You do.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to pasdexcuses for the beta work.

Back in his private rooms after dinner, Remus pours a cup of tea and sits down at his desk to consider his first week of being Professor Lupin.

Physically, he feels better than he has in years. Three meals a day, a decent bed to sleep in, and, most crucial of all, Dumbledore's promise of wolfsbane every month. Emotionally, however, the week has been difficult, more so than he'd imagined. Every corridor of Hogwarts dredges up another memory he's spent the last twelve years trying to bury, and on top of that there is the disorienting experience of being around the students. Especially Harry, whom Remus taught for the first time yesterday. Even as he gave the lesson--Professor Lupin instructing the third years in boggart defense--Remus felt as if he, too, were thirteen again. It was unnerving. After the class ended he actually went and looked in the mirror to remind himself that he is a professor now, an adult. An adult with a complicated past, to be sure. And an unexpected chance at a future, a chance so graciously offered him by Dumbledore.

Remus takes a sip of tea. Just then, his door is thrown open with such force that the brass handle bangs against the stone wall. Remus startles in his chair, sloshing tea over the desk as Snape crosses the room in three long strides, his dark eyes flashing.

“Who told you?” he demands.

Remus blinks. He considers asking Snape what he thinks he’s doing, barging in on Remus like this. He considers saying, in his mildest voice, _You could knock._ But Snape’s expression stops him. And so he only stares.

He has often seen Snape’s face twisted in unpleasantness, but this is something different. No trace, now, of the small malevolent smile that betrays the pleasure Snape takes in someone else’s humiliation. No trace either, of Snape’s veneer of indifference, beneath which meanness and pettiness and old grudges all simmer, half-heartedly concealed.

Remus looks up into Snape’s face and feels distinctly alarmed. Snape’s long hair is disheveled, as if he’s been running, or shoving his hands through it in agitation. His lips are pressed together so tightly they’ve lost color at the edges. And the way he pinches his mouth in, the way he brings his brows together, the way his eyes narrow, shining with an intensity that Remus has seen somewhere before—and then he realizes. Snape’s face is twisted in pain.

Echoes of the other times Remus has seen this kind of pain on Snape’s face reverberate around him then, making something deep inside of Remus twist too.

“Who told me what?” he asks. “What’s happened?”

“Don’t lie to me, Lupin, or so help me, I will _kill_ you.” Snape brings both hands down hard on the desk, making Remus’s teacup rattle in its saucer. “Tell me. _Who told you_? Was it Lily?”

 _Lily_?

For a moment, Remus feels nothing but ghosts.

“Was what Lily?” he hears himself say.

Snape leans farther across the desk, bringing his face so close that Remus can smell the potions classroom on him, and the sweat that’s broken out across his forehead, with its tang of pain and—yes, fear.

“Did. Lily. Tell you. Because if she did, I can’t—I won’t—oh, for Merlin’s sake, Lupin, answer the question!”

“Lily,” Remus repeats stupidly. He looks at Snape’s hands trembling on the desk and resists the urge to cover one with his own; such a gesture would not comfort Snape, but further enrage him. Instead he meets Snape’s eyes and says, evenly but with feeling, “If you tell me what you’re talking about, I’ll do my best to answer.”

“This school is in an uproar,” Snape spits, “because YOU told Longbottom, in front of your entire class, to dress me up in women’s clothes so you could laugh at me.”

“What, the third years’ lesson? What’s that got to do with Lily?” Remus sits back in his chair, as if that might give him a wider lens through which to view whatever it is that’s going on here. “Severus, you’ve misunderstood the context. You know we were getting rid of a boggart. And Neville’s boggart took the shape of you. I suggested he picture you in his grandmother’s rather distinctive garb as a way of making you less frightening, which, given how you bully him, you’ve brought upon—”

“You had _no right_ , Lupin, to take something so _private_ —”

Snape breaks off. His face slackens, sallow cheeks blooming with two splotches of color as he realizes his mistake.

Remus realizes too. That it’s not Snape, but himself, who has misunderstood the context. That the image of Snape in a green silk dress means something entirely different to what he’d intended.

“Bugger fucking hell,” he mumbles, so abashed that without thinking, he grips Snape’s arm, as if he could press both his astonishment and his apology directly into Snape’s skin.

“Let go of me, werewolf.”

Remus does. He makes himself look up, into Snape’s furious and hurting eyes.

“Severus, I’m sorry. I had no idea. I swear I didn’t know.”

_“Was it Lily?”_

Remus shakes his head. “Lily never told me anything. No one did. Merlin’s bollocks, if I’d known that about you, I never would have told Neville to—Christ, _Legilimens_ me if you want to—”

All at once he feels the sweep of Snape’s mind into his, an anguished consciousness pulsing through him as images fly up from Remus’s memories into the forefront of their merged minds. The DADA lesson yesterday, the green silk dress, the vulture hat, Neville’s trembling mouth unfolding into laughter. And then the classroom fades and there’s Lily at eleven, Lily at fifteen, Lily by the lake, a hundred Lilys, all freckles and sharp tongues, Lily’s deft fingers on Remus’s scars, the gravity of her kindness when she touches him, Lily and Remus by the fire, Lily in her wedding dress, Lily with a dark-haired baby at her bare breast, and James kneeling beside her, reaching out his hand —

“Aaugh,” Snape cries, breaking the connection as he stumbles backward.

Remus feels dizzy and slightly sick. _Lily Lily Lily._ His insides are roiling with memories and feelings he doesn’t usually let himself revisit; _Lily_ stirred up and churning through him, _Lily,_ and now here come the others, Sirius and Peter and James all rising in his guts, up through his heart, pleading for his attention. Remus shoves them all back down again with as much force as he can, because he _has_ to fix this. For once in his miserable life, he should do right by Severus Snape.

He presses his hand to his forehead and tries to collect himself.

“I won’t tell anyone,” he says. “And look, Severus, I don’t think that what you like to wear is funny, or shameful, or, or anything. I think it’s fine, and I—”

“Your thoughts on my private life,” Snape says through clenched teeth, “are of no interest to me.”

“I’m just trying to say I’m on your side, all right?”

“You have never been on my side!”

There are too many ways that’s true. Remus will not let this become yet another one. He tries a different tack.

“ _Lily_ was on your side,” he says. “About this. She must have been.” This is dangerous ground, but he presses on. “I’m sure that when you told her about this, she’d have said she didn’t care what you fancy wearing, and that she’d keep it secret if you wanted. Well, I feel the same. And I’ll _do_ the same, that’s all I’m say—”

“You’re not saying _anything_ worth hearing, Lupin, because as usual you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Snape shakes his head, his long hair swinging before him and half-obscuring his face. “I didn’t _tell_ Lily; she found out, and she didn’t make any little _speeches_ to me about it, because we were both sodding _nine_.”

Nine. Remus sucks in his breath. He had let himself forget. Snape had Lily’s friendship first, long before any of them.

“And I _never_ did it at Hogwarts,” Snape adds viciously, “not _once_ in seven years, because it was too fucking _dangerous_ , thanks to you and your mates. If you lot had found me out, you would have _crucified_ me. ”

“I—” Remus begins. And stops. The voices of James and Sirius, even at fifteen years’ distance, are blistering. He bows his head. “If I could change one thing I did back then,” he says, “I’d change my silence.”

“The word is ‘complicity,’ Lupin.”

Remus feels sick again. “Yes.”

“Not that it matters, since you’re lying. Your silence isn’t the thing you would have changed.”

Even without using legilimency, Remus thinks, Snape is more perceptive than any of them ever gave him credit for.

“I want to make amends, Severus.” Remus forces his voice to stay steady, his hands to hold still. “The four of us fucked you over nine ways from Sunday back when we were students, and it was vile. I knew it then, and I know it more deeply now. We were—I was—awful. And I don’t want to keep being awful to you, not even by mistake. And as for the cross-dressing—you just saw in my mind that I _didn’t_ know that about you, and I only made that suggestion to Neville because you’ve bullied him so badly—”

“Something you and your mates knew _nothing_ about—”

“ _What I mean to say_ ,” Remus persists, raising his voice, “is that no matter how you treated Neville, I should have taught the lesson differently. No one deserves to be mocked if...if they’re not being loved at the same time.”

“Very touching, I’m sure. But the damage is already done.”

Snape doesn’t mean yesterday’s damage. He means all of it. Remus suddenly feels very tired.

“I don’t want to keep doing more damage,” he says earnestly. “We’ll be teaching together all year, and I don’t want it to be torture for either of us. I know you won’t ever like me or respect me, but—look, Severus, if Lily were here, _she_ would have wanted me to do what I could to make it up to you. And I want to try.”

“But she’s _not_ here, is she? Because _your boyfriend_ , your sun-shines-out-of-his-pureblood-arse Death Eater boyfriend Sirius Black, _sold her_ to—”

“ _Silencio_!” Remus howls, his wand already in mid-flick before he can stop himself.

But Snape is just as fast. The word is scarcely out of Remus’s mouth before Snape’s wand is up too, thin ropes issuing from the tip. Remus is thrown backward against the wall, the spell’s cords whipping around his neck, his wrists and ankles. Snape’s mouth is still moving, though no sound comes out, his wand pointing at Remus’s throat. Then Snape presses his lips together and advances on Remus, who, spread-eagled against the wall, is still clutching his wand in his bound hand.

They have both gone too far. This is the last thing that should be happening, the two of them firing curses at each other like teenagers. They are _acting_ like teenagers, and Remus will not allow Snape to bring him back down to that level.

“ _Finite Incantatem_ ,” he says clearly, twisting his wrist to point his wand at Snape’s mouth. Snape licks his lips as the spell lifts but does not speak or remove the spell binding Remus. He simply stares at him, his entire body shimmering with anger. 

Remus closes his eyes, feeling the pain in his head where it struck the wall. Closing the eyes, he thinks, is a gesture of neither defiance nor submission; it is simply withdrawal. But withdrawal is not the correct response. And it is up to Remus to correct things. It _has_ to be him, because he is the only one in the room in possession of both the ability and the temperament. And the sense of guilt.

He opens his eyes again but keeps his gaze fixed on the floor.

“I submit,” he says quietly.

Snape’s quick intake of breath is almost inaudible. “And what do you imagine you’re submitting to?”

“Er.” Remus bites his lip. Hard, because suddenly it’s funny. “The bondage you’ve just put me in?”

“You think that’s what I want from you? Your submission to an intemperately cast spell?”

“Then I’ve misunderstood. Enlighten me, Severus, please.” Remus bites harder and feels the soft skin break. Good, because he’s using the wrong tone entirely; he’s fucking _baiting_ Snape and he really, really doesn’t want to be.

“I don’t want anything from you,” Snape growls, “save that your miserable existence be entirely separate from mine. A wish that, for the foreseeable future, is unfortunately impossible.”

But Snape has not released the bonds. He does want something.

Remus sucks the drops of blood into his mouth. Blood tastes of so many things to him. Desire and hurt. Hunger and the loss of control. Satiety, and loneliness, and sometimes stones in rain. But right now, this blood tastes of consequences. Layers of them, built up like rust. He sucks his bitten lip again. It tastes of rust, of something that should have been taken care of but was not. He looks up, feeling sober again.

“Then perhaps _I_ want something from _you_ ,” he says. “I want the chance to make amends. On your terms, however you interpret that.”

Snape’s eyebrows flicker up for just a moment. “My terms?” he repeats. “My terms are unlikely to be ones you’d agree to.”

“Try me.”

“Look at me first,” Snape says.

“No more legilimency.”

“I won’t cast that spell. But I do want to see if you’re in earnest. Look at me.”

Remus gazes at Snape, who is still standing by the desk. He tries not to fidget in the wrist bonds, and he tries very hard to close his mind and not think of anything but what’s right in front of him: Snape’s thin lips pressed to a line; Snape’s eyes staring at him in frowning concentration, the irises so dark they seem to be all pupil; Snape’s black hair falling in strings across his pale skin, hair falling so differently from the way Sirius’s would—

Remus blinks.

 _Snape’s_ black hair falling—

“I see,” Snape says. He pauses, and Remus has the feeling he’s making up his mind about something. “Very well,” he says after a moment. “You want my terms? Here. First: if you reveal to anyone so much as a _syllable_ of this discussion, the knowledge I have of your secret, Lupin, will be put to immediate use against you. Everywhere. In every way I can.”

“I have a lot of faults, Severus. But telling other people’s secrets isn’t one of them.”

Snape takes two strides on his long legs, which brings him so close that once again, Remus smells the bitter traces of the potions classroom. Snape leans in until his nose almost brushes Remus’s ear.

“And second,” he says softly, “I want to hurt you.”

Remus lets that sink in.

“While I’m tied up like this, you mean,” he says, just to be saying something.

“You know what I mean.” This too a whisper in his ear. “I’d like to make you suffer. It would please me. And it might...” Snape’s voice fades away for a moment as he steps back. “It might help even the score.”

Remus thinks of the four hourglasses out in the Hogwarts entrance hall, the ones that keep track of House points. In matters involving Snape, the Gryffindor hourglass has always been empty. And if that’s ever going to change, it will have to be through Remus. Because James and Peter and Lily are all dead, and Sirius, if he hasn’t died escaping, will be worse than dead when the dementors recapture him. Remus is the only one left.

“Well?” Snape prompts, looking not at Remus but at the wall behind his shoulder.

“Give me a minute.”

He wonders whether Snape has thought this through enough to consider that Remus’s tolerance for physical pain is extraordinarily high. There is not much Snape could do to him, short of killing him, that Remus has not done to himself on a monthly basis for nearly thirty years. And immobilized like this, with Snape’s hot breath against his jaw, Remus can’t deny that it is—not _distracting_ him from the past, exactly, nothing does that—but adding a different component. Adding something to the present. And this is inviting. Snape has invited him: to participate in something that will be meaningful to them both. Not enjoyable, no; in itself, the prospect of Snape hurting him is no more arousing to Remus than it is frightening. But it will be meaningful, and _that_ makes him feel engaged. A prickle of desire whispers through him then, not for the pain, but for the engagement. For perhaps, even, the intimacy of it.

“Yes,” Remus says. Beside him, through the air between them, he feels Snape slacken with relief. And then grow tense again as Remus adds: “If I can be allowed one stipulation.”

“Which is?”

“We’re not on very safe ground, Severus—”

“I never stand on safe ground.” 

“I’m beginning to see that. For which you’ve earned my respect.”

“Your respect or lack thereof is of no more interest to me than your opinions.”

“We are, however, negotiating something; are we not?”

Snape makes an irritated noise in his throat. Remus waits.

“Speak, then,” Snape says impatiently. “I’m listening.”

“We’re not on safe ground because you obviously don’t trust me. And I don’t trust you. It might not go well, what we do next. And if it doesn’t—” Remus closes his eyes, gathering himself. 

His one vulnerability, the one thing in him that Snape has his fist around.

“Well?” Snape prompts.

“The wolfsbane potion,” Remus says, keeping his voice even. “Promise me you’ll keep making it.”

“I won’t promise you that.”

“Then unbind me.”

“ _Wait._ ”

The word flares with urgency. Snape wants this, Remus realizes. Snape wants it much more than he’s let on.

“I promised Dumbledore,” Snape says from behind his teeth, “that I would brew wolfsbane every month for as long as you’re employed here. And I have promised _myself_ , for reasons that have only to do with the pride I take in my abilities, that I will prepare it perfectly each time. But I will not make either of those promises to you.”

Remus nods.

“I accept that. I—I don’t have any other stipulations.”

Snape’s eyebrows flicker up, though his face remains impassive. “You _do_ trust me a little, then.”

“No. I owe you.”

“Yes,” Snape says quietly. “You do.”

It’s a riding crop. Remus hadn’t expected something so very British, so very British _Muggle_. Across his naked arse and thighs each strike sears through him, the pain bright and hot as flames. A concentrated burning that slowly diffuses as it spreads, down below his skin, down into the muscle. He’s facing the wall now, bound only by his wrists, his legs spread wide to hold himself in place. He keeps his eyes closed, the better to focus as he tries not to tense up in anticipation of each subsequent blow. Snape is strong, and each hit comes hard enough to knock the breath out of him if he isn’t focused. But Remus is focused. He is an expert at maintaining focus through extraordinary pain. Yet he can’t prevent each strike from burning, with a fire that seems to cut right through him each time the tip of the crop lands.

After the first dozen blows, though, something else begins to happen. A wave of endorphins spills through Remus, dizzying his body, filling his lungs with something richer than oxygen. It’s completely unlike what happens during transformation. Inside the rush of it, Remus begins to feel that he is floating. Part of his consciousness is anchored in his body, monitoring the sequences of pain, the sound the crop makes whizzing through the air just before it strikes, the snapping sound against his flesh, and then the searing ache that follows. But another part of him feels oddly detached from the experience, relaxed almost. Unlike when he transforms, this pain does not have its origin within him. He is not causing it, and neither is he responsible for its management, its outcome. Something like relief—and then relief itself—flows over him. He can drown here if he wants to. He can let go.

And maybe he does, because the next thing he knows, layered into the whistle and snap of the crop, is Snape’s voice in his ear, sibilant and urgent and startling him back into consciousness of where he is, and with whom and why.

“ _This_ one,” Snape hisses, “is for the time Potter broke my nose in the second floor bathroom.”

_crack_

Remus had not expected this. He is so caught off-guard that the crop strikes without his having prepared for it, so that when it lands, it feels different, feels like what it is: punishment. Remus doesn’t even remember that Snape ever had a broken nose. Did James bother to tell him of it later? Did Remus hear about it but forget? Or, oh, no, was he—could he have been _there_? And then simply forgotten?

“And this is for the time Black and Potter strung me upside down—”

_crack_

“—while you and Pettigrew and _Lily—”_

_crack_

“—and half the school—”

_crack_

“stood by and _watched—”_

Remus feels his body begin to tremble in a way that at first he thinks is just internal: his heart beating faster, the blood leaving his arms because the wrist bindings are too tight, or maybe it’s the blood in his body rushing to the places where he’s being hit. There is a rushing in his ears like water, making it harder to hear the sound of the crop whistling through the air, and harder too to hear Snape’s voice until Remus can’t tell anymore when the strikes will come, and can’t hear the details of the crimes Snape is reciting, the crimes that make Snape hit him so hard.

_crack_

“—vomiting my guts out—”

_crack_

“—Sirius Black’s _boot_ —” 

_crack_

“—and _you stood there_.”

Snape is still biting out words, but Remus’s teeth are chattering now and he can’t really hear anymore. Someone is yelling and he’s not sure if it’s him or Snape, and someone is crying and he’s pretty sure it’s him.

“And this—”

_crack_

“this—”

_crack_

_…_

_crack_

_…_

The sounds have stopped, Remus realizes. Snape’s voice has stopped, the whistle of the crop through the air has stopped, the crack of it striking his flesh has stopped. 

Snape has stopped hitting him. His body is on fire and Remus is not sure how long it’s been that way. For a moment he’s not sure whether Snape is even in the room anymore. But then comes a softly uttered _Libero,_ and the bonds shackling Remus’s wrists to the wall suddenly vanish. Remus stumbles. Then he falls to the floor.

The stone is cool against his skin, smoother and cleaner than the splintery floorboards of the Shrieking Shack. It feels good to rest his cheek against this stone, to rest his chest and thighs. He could sleep here, even, save that his arse and the backs of his thighs are in flames. Burning too intensely for him to sleep or do anything other than try to be in the parts of his body that are not burning, to be only in the skin that is resting against the cool stone floor. 

And maybe he does sleep, or something less easy than sleep but equally unconscious. Maybe he has passed out and is only now just waking. The burning is still there, but the compensating cool of the stone floor is gone now, warmed by his skin so that now it only feels uncomfortable, and hurts his bony hips. He shifts a little and feels a set of fingers touch his shoulder. Remus flinches. 

“Can you stand?”

He knows the voice is Snape’s, but it doesn't sound like him. It sounds too...neutral. Remus opens his eyes and shuts them again at once because Snape’s face is just a few inches from his own, his dark eyes staring into Remus’s. From behind his eyelids Remus notes how pale Snape’s face is, and that the whites of his eyes are now bloodshot. 

Had Snape asked him a question? Yes, and now he’s asking it again.

“Lupin. Can you stand up?”

Remus thinks about it. 

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Then, more clearly: “I don’t want to.”

He doesn’t want to get up off the floor because he isn’t sure yet whether he’s paid enough, or how much enough is, and how much of it is up to him to pay. And the stone in the floor does not require that he know any of these answers. It will not be moved, no matter what he says or does.

“Do you have dittany salve here?” Snape asks then.

Remus opens his eyes again, considers where “here” might be. A shelf of books across the room looks familiar. Is his.

“In my bedroom,” he says after a moment.

Snape points his wand at a half-open door beside the bookshelf. A glass jar glides through the air and drops into his hand.

It looks so strange, Remus thinks, his jar of salve in the hand of Severus Snape. Remus has kept dittany salve in this jar for years, and for years no one has touched it except him. No one else has ever picked it up or offered to help him treat his monthly injuries or even inquired about the salve’s existence. No one since Sirius. Remus watches as Snape unscrews the lid and feels a different kind of hurt bloom across the surface of his skin. Sirius, who knew just how gently to press, knew how to touch Remus all over, how to bring him back to humanness again. The memory flares through him like a fever, an illness he’ll never be rid of: his loneliness for Sirius, his longing for him, his— 

Snape points his wand across the room again and a small pillow from the armchair rises and floats toward them, growing as it approaches, until it’s the size of a single mattress.

“ _Mobilicorpus_ ,” Snape adds, pointing his wand at Remus, and Remus feels himself lifted a few inches off the ground, the mattress sliding in beneath him.

“Better?” Snape asks.

Remus nods, feeling the stuffing give a bit as Snape kneels close beside him. Then Snape’s fingers are touching the backs of Remus’s thighs. The potion slides over his skin like a cross between butter and ice, soothing and reviving all at once. _This_ is how good it feels when someone else’s hands dress his injuries.

“This potion is terrible,” Snape says.

“What?”

“Where did you get this stuff? Whoever made it had no idea what he was doing.”

Remus twists around so he can look back over his shoulder. “I was _always_ arse at potions,” he says, smiling a little. “You may remember.”

Snape scowls. “But this one’s not difficult. Dittany, arnica, murtlap, aloe. In that order. Counter-clockwise the first hour, then clockwise at the end.”

“Not difficult for _you_ , you mean. _”_

Snape sniffs at that and turns his attention back to Remus’s legs. Remus closes his eyes again, sinking into the ease with which Snape’s hands are spreading the healing potion across his burning thighs. The same hands that laid down the injuries in the first place, the hands of a man who hates him. How good those hands feel now, and how strange that they’re caressing him, cooling the fire of the welts on the backs of his legs.

But most of the blows were to his arse. Will Snape touch him there as well?

He will. Snape’s fingers scoop more salve, and then his warm hands are there too, lightly slicking dittany across both buttocks. Remus shivers at the cooling of it, and beneath him, against the mattress, his cock twitches.

“I worked you over,” Snape says suddenly, voice low. “Your arse is...extremely colorful.” And then, almost as an afterthought: “You took it well. I was impressed.”

Well, there’s frost on Hell’s windowpanes, Remus thinks: Severus Snape has paid him a compliment. He knows that the only possible response is to pretend he hasn’t heard it; acknowledgement would be met with derision. So he simply lies there, his cock growing harder with each pass of Snape’s salve-slicked hands across the globes of his arse. The potion has begun to work; the burning is beginning to subside into a tolerable heat, a gentle throb. It feels good, in fact. It feels good to be touched like this, the sleekness of hands across his skin, his skin made so sensitive by the whipping that he can feel each fingertip whispering across him. Remus shivers again, resists the urge to slide his hand below his belly and stroke himself. He can’t risk doing anything that might make Snape stop healing him.

Snape’s hands soothing him, the pressure of his fingers growing stronger as the pain subsides. Massaging him, and then, just then, Snape’s thumb slips into the cleft of his arse. And just as suddenly is gone.

A mistake? 

Snape’s hands resume the circles they’re making, massaging, cupping Remus’s arse cheeks, then sweeping down over his thighs. Then up. Then down again. Remus holds himself still, but he can’t keep his body from tensing. The pulsing heat comes not from the injuries now, but from deep inside Remus, from his belly, his fully erect cock. Snape strokes and cups his arse again, and before Remus can stop himself, he’s thrusting back into the touch.

Both of Snape’s thumbs slip back into his cleft. Down into the dip beyond the hurt skin, down to where the crop hasn’t touched, where nothing was injured but where suddenly everything aches because Snape has just touched the pucker of his arsehole so lightly. And then the touch is gone.

Remus arches back, searching for the contact again, and reaching for his cock as he does it. He takes himself hard in his own hand, and above him Snape exhales, long and quiet. And brings both thumbs back down.

Everything so soft but for the slight catch of a thumbnail that sends a shower of sparks through Remus as he arches up against Snape’s thumb and the thumb presses back against him. Not inside him, just against him. Presses and stays.

Remus turns his head, sighs one word.

“Yes.”

Loosening his robes, Snape drops one long leg over Remus’s thighs and straddles him. The hissing sound of trousers being Vanished, and then the heat of Snape’s naked thighs against his own, brushing against Remus as Snape’s fingers sweep over his arse, his cleft, his hole.  

And then it’s a cock, thick and heavy and hard. A cock spreading dittany across what’s left of the marks. _Snape’s_ cock, sliding across the globes of his arse, pressing down into his cleft. Snape’s _cock,_ and it’s all familiar, somehow, because Snape is familiar, his scent, his voice, his body—all known, though never like this, with the cool of the dittany melting into the slip and friction of skin on slicked skin as Snape begins to thrust between his cheeks. Remus had not even realized how much he’s longed for this, how deeply he’s longed to be caressed and stroked and healed and just fucking _touched_. 

“You like this?” Snape asks hoarsely.

“Yes— _need_ it—”

And the smallest of moans slips from Snape’s mouth.

Oh, he needs it—Snape’s cock frotting over his arsehole, Snape’s hands braced on the small of his back. Snape moving against him, thrusting against him and neither of them speaking. Remus arches up into it, wanking himself faster. Small moans escape them both, a conversation they can’t ever have in words. Both of them riding it together, the rhythm of skin and sweat and sex making a way that they can be together, move together, work together and not hurt each other now— 

“You feel so good,” Remus blurts, and with a low groan Snape comes, in hot lines across Remus’s back. Marking his skin again, but with white this time. With release, not rage. Remus’s own orgasm uncoils in response and he spills into the magicked mattress, hot and wet against his hand and belly. Emptied. Spent.

Too soon, Snape pulls away, shifting out of the straddle and moving to sit sideways on the mattress, pulling his robes closed around him. He settles his back against the wall, long legs triangled over Remus, forearms crossed over his knees.

Not a very intimate position to take after sex, Remus thinks, but this is still Snape, after all. Remus rolls onto his side and looks up at his adolescent enemy—the man who’s beaten him, and then gently taken care of him, and then fucked him. The man who just came all over his back.

Snape is looking off toward the fireplace at the opposite end of the room, giving Remus a chance to study his profile. There are lines around Snape’s mouth and eyes, creases in his forehead. They are adults now, both of them. Snape looks exhausted, and—is it even possible to think of Snape this way?—vulnerable. He sits with his shoulders hunched, oddly unguarded; Remus does not remember a time he’s seen Snape lost in thought like this, so different from the look he has when he is silently calculating something.

"You used the Muggle term before,” Snape says abruptly.

“What Muggle term?”

“Cross-dressing.”

“Well, I’m certainly not going to use the Wizard slang.”

“ _Wand-waster_.” Snape’s voice is bitter. 

“I don’t think anyone who knows you could ever accuse you of wasting your wand,” Remus says, lightly he hopes. When Snape doesn’t reply, he tries again. “Severus? Perhaps I’ve spent more time among Muggles than you have. There are parts of Muggle London that are a damn sight more tolerant than Knockturn Alley. Have you...have you been to Muggle clubs where they do drag?”

Snape does not answer, or give any sign he’s even listening.

“You can dress up,” Remus pushes on, raising himself up on his elbow, “and see other men do it, and it’s not dirty, or shameful; it’s brilliant. And dramatic and...sweeping. And the women—I mean the blokes being women—they sing onstage, and they’re _beautiful_.” 

Snape’s mouth contorts, and Remus realizes, too late, that he’s said the wrong thing. That _beautiful_ is is not the word to offer Severus Snape, a man over six feet tall with a mouthful of crooked yellow teeth and a nose like a vulture and a hardness that will not ever soften enough to allow anyone else to see him softened. Not even the diamond-hard, glitter-sharp _drag_ kind of softened, because even that involves the softness of cleavage, of breasts, the curve of hips and arse, the cock tucked out of sight. The drag shows that Remus has seen have involved a kind of public yearning, and a celebration of that yearning, which Snape would never do. Remus holds his breath, waiting for Snape to get up and storm out in a whirl of black robes.

But Snape stays where he is.

“I don’t do it in public,” is all he says.

“Then what about—” Remus falters. Then he takes a breath and risks it. “If you wanted to show me anything, Severus, I would—watch. If you wanted.”

Snape lets his head fall forward, black hair falling in a curtain across his profile so Remus can no longer see his face.

“Why?” he asks.

Inside himself, Remus makes an enormous effort to be truthful, because he owes Snape that too. 

“I think it would make me like you better,” he admits. 

“In a sexual way, you mean?”

“I’m not sure about that; I meant emotionally. Because...because it would be more honest.”

Snape turns his head toward Remus at last. “That’s quite amusing, coming from you. But no. I don’t do it in front of other people.”

“Never?”

“No. Except when—” Snape trails off.

“Lily?” Remus ventures.

Back inside his curtain of hair, Snape nods.

“Just the once then? When you were nine?” 

Remus prays Snape will say no to that, because it’s too sad otherwise, and if Remus breathes a word that sounds like pity, allows so much as an eyebrow-twitch that looks like pity, Snape will hex his balls right down his throat.

“More than once,” Snape says. “The first time was when she caught me, but after that...”

He falls silent again. Remus does not dare speak, or even move. And Snape resumes.

“My father,” he says, his face still hidden, “never liked magic. I used to have to hide from him—from his temper—quite a bit. When I was small, I often hid in my mum’s bedroom cupboard. He never looked there. He didn’t like—” Snape pushes his hair back behind his ears, and Remus sees his face scrunched into a kind of knot— “ _soft_ things. And when Lily and I began playing together, she’d hide there with me too. One day when she came around looking for me, she found me in the cupboard—dressing up.” Snape turns his head away. “And Lily—she just joined in. And we played together like that. For years. Even after we started at Hogwarts; for the first few years, we still did it in the summertime. Lily always knew that for me, it wasn’t just a game.”

Remus wants to touch Snape’s arm, to stroke his leg, to put both his arms around Snape’s shoulders and hold him. But Snape would never allow it.

There is one thing, though, that he could offer. If he can bring himself to do it. Gingerly, Remus scoots himself out from under Snape’s legs and gets to his knees.

“Severus? I want to give you something.” 

He _can_ stand up, though he’s a little shaky. The thing he wants is in a cardboard box in his room. He doesn’t let himself look in there much, and he doesn’t look now—just reaches in and lets his fingers find it, the smooth give of the silk unmistakable among the letters and scraps of parchment and photographs. Lily’s head scarf. The last time she was at their flat, the flat Remus shared with Sirius, she took it off, this silky pale green thing, and then forgot to collect it when she left. And the next time Remus saw her—the last time he ever saw her—he forgot to give it back.

 _Quickly now_ , he thinks. Before he changes his mind. Remus kisses it once, the old silk soft as a girl’s skin, then carries it back to the outer room. Snape has gotten up off the mattress and is putting on his trousers.  

Remus goes up to him, feeling very naked. He resists the urge to hold the fabric over his genitals.

“This was Lily’s,” he says. “And now it’s yours.”

Snape takes the silk and brings it to his face, just as Remus did a moment ago. He inhales deeply. Remus knows there is no trace of Lily on it anymore; there hasn’t been for years. He’s smelled it when his nose is most sensitive, just after transformation, and her scent’s no longer there. But it’s still _her_. Snape takes another breath through the silk and runs it along his cheek, closing his eyes. Then he shoves the scarf deep in the pocket of his robes.

“Thank you, Lupin.”

Remus prickles with annoyance. Surely this gift should merit Snape’s calling him _Remus_ , just this fucking once? It’s _Lily’s silk_. And then he feels even more annoyed, but with himself now, because he didn’t give Snape the handkerchief to win his gratitude, to earn some sodding grownup version of House points—that wasn’t what was in his heart at all.

Remus nods to show he’s heard Snape’s thanks. He doesn’t trust himself to speak.

“I’ll go now,” Snape says. His hand stays in his pocket, clutching the crumpled silk.

Remus nods again, and reaches for his pants, which lie heaped beside the desk with the rest of his clothes. By the time he’s got them on, Snape has his hand on the doorknob.

“I’ll bring you some better dittany salve next month,” Snape says. “Not that you’ll need it for transformations, not with the wolfsbane. But you should know how to recognize when it’s been brewed properly.”

“Thanks,” says Remus stiffly, feeling truly angry now, but he makes himself go to the door to see Snape out. 

 _Fifty points to Gryffindor, Remus Lupin, for your generosity AND your forbearance_ (this in Dumbledore’s voice)—

At the door, Snape turns. “And Lupin—about Longbottom.”

“Yes?”

“We both know he’s weak. You don’t do him any favors by coddling him the way you do. He’s got to learn to toughen up.”

“An opinion about boys I’d guess your father shared.”

And just that fast, Snape’s hand is digging into the soft place above Remus’s collarbone, his fingers pressing down into the tendons hard enough to make Remus gasp.

“Listen well, werewolf,” Snape hisses. “Don’t _ever_ speak to me about my father.”

Remus is as strong as Snape is. Stronger, maybe. He doesn’t need to curse him. He doesn’t need to strike him. He doesn’t need to do anything except what he does do, which is to answer in his calmest voice.

“The scene is over, Snape. Let go.”

Snape does.

And leaves, just that fast.

Rubbing the tendons above his clavicle, Remus watches him stalk down the corridor, one hand still in his robes. Holding the square of silk that until a few minutes ago was Remus’s.

Watching him, Remus remembers that the war caught all of them when they were scarcely more than children, and that for Snape, as for himself, its marks will never go away.

He remembers that Lily was the person Snape loved early and completely. Loved, perhaps, with the same intensity that Remus loved Sirius. _Loves_ Sirius, because a terrible part of Remus still loves Sirius even now, with an absolute refusal of the past tense.

He remembers that Severus, like Sirius, grew up with the hatred of a parent—a person who should have loved him best, beyond reason, forever; but did not.

 _Lily_ would want Snape to have the silk, Remus thinks.

But the thought doesn’t make him feel any better.

Maybe somewhere, in some unplottable area of Hogwarts—a place that, like the Room of Requirement, the four of them never managed to get onto the map—there _is_ an hourglass that still keeps points for all its former students; a single hourglass in which all their actions fall jumbled together, all the rubies and emeralds and sapphires and diamonds accruing or disappearing as the thousands of witches and wizards who passed through Hogwarts make their way through the remainder of their lives. If such an hourglass does exist, Remus hopes that tonight he’s added a ruby or two to the pile. Because right now, standing alone in his doorway, he’s got nothing else.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Rarepairs like this don't get much notice, so your kudos, comments and recs, if you'd like to make them, would be extra appreciated.


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